Weedlessness: But my favorite thing about this bait is how well it comes through weeds. Fished on sixty five pound braid, you can throw the Soft Magic Swimmer into just about anything and make it swim, dart, snake, and shimmy its way back to you.
Itís far easier to work than a crankbait, and you can swim it just as fast and
make it bump into limbs, rocks, and weeds.

These spare weights can be slipped over the barb of your hook securely and taken back off by gently twisting. They are a combination of rubber and tungsten powder.

You can dip it through holes in overgrown vegetation, fire it through tule patches, and skip it under docks and it comes back to you very easily. Granted, the hook will expose itself if your cast is too forceful or abusive on the bait ( e.g., if you hit it off a dock post or skip it really hard ), but for the most part, that hook stays hidden away very effectively during the retrieve.

For rigging on most all these soft bodied swimbaits, the eye of the hook can be fed through the head of the bait first, through the back side to save on wear and tear.

Hook up Ratio: An issue many of these slit belly, soft plastic baits have is with hook up ratio. Sometimes, the plastic of the bait is too stiff for consistent hook penetration until the bait gets a little worn. The Sebile Soft Magic Swimmer is made of a plastic that has just the right consistency for respectable durability and weedlessness while delivering very good hook setting performance. Just make sure you’re using a rod with decent backbone and not a super soft,
crankbait-like stick.

Trey Kistler joins in our testing regimen out on Falcon Lake and discovers how fun it can be at times, to be a TackleTour editor.

Durability: As mentioned earlier, our baits held up well during abusive casts deliberately and not so deliberately into rocks, pilings, tules and the like. I couldn’t get into a hot bite to really test how they hold up against repeated bites, so the jury is still out on that one aspect. A school of small striper is perfect for this kind of tests, but that Fall bite on the Delta just didn’t pan out when we had these baits in hand.

The Sebile Magic Swimmer is a fun bait to fish!

Availability: The Sebile Soft Magic Swimmer has been available since late 2009 and in fairly good quantities. The original five inch baits come three to a pack for
fifteen dollars and this product is now available in a four inch size as well
for sixteen dollars per four per pack. Each package comes with one bait pre-rigged on a 5/0 EWG hook and includes several soft, tungsten weights for the shank of the hook.

Ratings:
(We've
re-calibrated our
ratings standard for
2008 and have
included a key at
the bottom of the
following matrix as
a guide):

Sebile Soft Magic SwimmerRatings
(?/10)

Construction/Quality

The Soft Magic Swimmer is put together well with clean lines and no extra pieces of plastic hanging from the baits

8

Performance

This bait dances like crazy and delivers a good bite to hookup ratio

9

Price

(At the
time we
originally
published
the
review
we had
the
price
wrong
for the
baits
with a
price of
over $5
a bait,
as we
had the
wrong
number
of baits
per pack
per size in the
equation)
We have
since
upped
the
price
from
"fair"
to a
strong
"good"
as the
larger
baits
are 5
dollars
each and
the
smaller
baits
are 4
dollars
per bait

7.5

Features

Weedless design is the key

8

Design
(Ergonomics)

A little odd looking considering the bait has no tail, but that doesn't stop the bites from coming

Conclusion: My first sample of the Sebile Magic Swimmer was with their four ounce, nine inch, hard bait. After two or three casts, I cut the bait off and went back to a more traditional swimbait and never touched another Magic Swimmer after that. The soft version of this bait has changed all of that and now I can understand the interest and intrigue the original hard bait created – I just sampled the wrong size to begin with.

Back home at Clear Lake, California, I can't say enough about how well this bait comes through weeds and how much fun it is to work.

But the soft version has one very big advantage over the hard bait original – it’s weedless and can be tossed into a number of different situations where you’d never dream of throwing the hard bait. The action on this bait is superb, and for now, it’s readily available. I know I’ll continue to use it as I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of what this bait has to offer.